Sentence-Structure Priming
in Young Children Who Do
and Do Not Stutter
Julie D. Anderson
Edward G. Conture
Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN
The purpose of this study was to use an age-appropriate version of the sentencestructure priming paradigm (e.g., K. Bock, 1990; K. Bock, H. Loebell, & R. Morey,
1992) to assess experimentally the syntactic processing abilities of children who
stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 16
CWS and 16 CWNS between the ages of 3;3 (years; months) and 5;5, matched
for gender and age (±4 months). All participants had speech, language, and
hearing development within normal limits, with the exception of stuttering for
CWS. All children participated in a sentence-structure priming task where they
were shown and asked to describe, on a computer screen, black-on-white line
drawings of children, adults, and animals performing activities that could be
appropriately described using simple active affirmative declarative (SAAD)
sentences (e.g., “The man is walking the dog”). Speech reaction time (SRT) was
measured from the onset of the picture presentation to the onset of the child’s
verbal response in the absence and presence of priming sentences, counterbalanced for order. Main findings indicated that CWS exhibited slower SRTs in the
absence of priming sentences and greater syntactic-priming effects than CWNS.
These findings suggest that CWS may have difficulty rapidly, efficiently planning
and/or retrieving sentence-structure units, difficulties that may contribute to their
inabilities to establish fluent speech-language production.
KEY WORDS: stuttering, sentence-structure priming, syntactic priming, children,
linguistic processing
I
n recent years, various studies have been conducted regarding the
linguistic skills of children who stutter (CWS; for reviews, see Louko,
Conture, & Edwards, 1999; Ratner, 1997), as well as linguistic determinants of instances of stuttering-like disfluencies (e.g., Howell, AuYeung, & Sackin, 1999; Hubbard & Prins, 1994; Zackheim & Conture,
2003). For example, when compared with children who do not stutter
(CWNS), CWS have been found to score lower on measures of expressive and/or receptive language (Byrd & Cooper, 1989; Murray & Reed,
1977; Westby, 1974) and receptive vocabulary (e.g., Meyers & Freeman,
1985; Ryan, 1992; cf. Silverman & Ratner, 2002), as well as exhibit significantly more grammatical errors in their conversational speech
(Westby, 1974) and simpler, less mature language (Howell & Au-Yeung,
1995; Wall, 1980). CWS have also been found to exhibit a quantifiably
greater difference between measures of receptive/expressive language
and receptive vocabulary than CWNS (Anderson & Conture, 2000), which
suggests the possibility of an imbalance among components or aspects
of the speech-language systems of CWS (see Tetnowski, 1998).
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June
2004 • ©American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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2004
1092-4388/04/4703-0552
Conversely, longitudinal studies of preschool CWS
have reported that CWS exhibit expressive language
abilities near or above developmental expectations on
the basis of comparisons with normative data (Watkins
& Yairi, 1997; Watkins, Yairi, & Ambrose, 1999). Watkins
et al.’s (1999) findings would initially appear to contradict the above-referenced studies. However, the abovereferenced studies generally reported that CWS tend to
score lower than their normally fluent peers on various
speech-language measures, but they still score within
the average range of abilities. One main difference between the studies by Watkins et al. and those reported
above is that the former compared the performance of
CWS to published normative data, whereas the latter
compared the performance of CWS to that of a control
group of CWNS. Perhaps, therefore, these differences
in methodology may have resulted in the appearance of
a discrepancy in findings concerning the language abilities of CWS, but in actuality there appears to be no such
discrepancy (see Anderson & Conture, 2000).
Based on much of the evidence reported above, some
have begun to speculate that stuttering may be related
to difficulties with phonological, lexical, and/or syntactic processing (e.g., Au-Yeung & Howell, 1998; Kolk &
Postma, 1997; Ratner, 1997; Wijnen & Boers, 1994). One
essential ingredient of psycholinguistic models of stuttering, such as the covert repair hypothesis (Kolk &
Postma, 1997; Postma & Kolk, 1993), is the notion that
disturbances in time contribute to stuttering, thereby
implicating the “rate of initiation and/or production of
speech as either an important originating or aggravating variable” (Conture, 2001, p. 37). Perhaps, therefore,
subtle to more apparent temporal difficulties in the planning for and/or production of speech and language by
CWS (Chang, Ohde, & Conture, 2002) may be sufficient
enough to disrupt, stall, or freeze the forward flow of
their planning for speech-language production, an event
that might temporarily lead to repairs or corrections that
are overtly manifest as hesitations, repetitions, and prolongations.
In fact, Garrett (1982) noted that “hesitations (filled
and silent pauses) may reflect transient increases in processing load, normal advance planning and retrieval for
an upcoming structural unit, or delay created by the
momentary inaccessibility of a needed piece of information” (as cited in Bock, 1995, p. 201). Applying such
speculation to young CWS, it may be possible that their
increased frequency of hesitations and/or disfluencies
reflect subtle to not-so-subtle difficulties with language
formulation processes. Specifically, they may be more
apt to experience transient increases in processing load,
difficulty planning and retrieving a structural unit, and/
or delay in accessing linguistic information. Consequently, these limitations in speech-language planning
processes may increase the probability of speech disfluencies in their spontaneous speech.
Despite growing interest in the relationship between
linguistic formulation processes and stuttering, to date,
more attention seems to have been paid to the phonological, lexical/semantic, and syntactic processing abilities of adults who stutter rather than CWS (Bosshardt,
1993, 1994; Bosshardt, Ballmer, & de Nil, 2002; Bosshardt
& Fransen, 1996; Burger & Wijnen, 1999; Cuadrado &
Weber-Fox, 2003; Hartsuiker, Kolk, & Lickley, in press;
Prins, Main, & Wampler, 1997; Wijnen & Boers, 1994).
Findings from these studies generally suggest that the
processing of semantic, syntactic, and/or phonological
information may be slower and/or less efficient in adults
who stutter when compared with their normally fluent
peers. However, it is unclear whether these findings can
be generalized to CWS because as Yairi (1993) noted,
“Advanced stuttering is markedly different from the
incipient form” (p. 198), and only a minority of children
will continue to stutter into adulthood, the latter of
which is consistent with Andrews and Harris’s (1964)
findings of a 79% “natural recovery rate” among CWS.
In essence, adults who stutter represent only a proportion of those who stuttered as children, and thus directly extrapolating findings from one age grouping to
the other must be done with considerable caution given
the developmental, changing nature of stuttering across
the life span.
Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there have
not been more experimental investigations of the syntactic processing abilities of CWS, considering the fact
that, as mentioned above, descriptive studies have typically shown, for example, that CWS produce more speech
disfluencies (stuttering-like and/or other disfluencies)
on longer or more syntactically complex utterances (e.g.,
Logan & Conture, 1995, 1997; Melnick & Conture, 2000;
Ratner & Sih, 1987; Yaruss, 1999), as well as on utterances longer than their mean length of utterance
(Zackheim & Conture, 2003). Likewise, young children
have been shown to exhibit increases in speech disfluency (stuttering-like and other disfluencies) when attempting to produce difficult or newly acquired morphosyntactic structures (e.g., Colburn & Mysak, 1982a, 1982b;
Gordon, Luper, & Peterson, 1986; Ratner, 1997; Ratner
& Sih, 1987; Wijnen, 1990). Findings of a consistent
relationship between speech disfluencies, utterance
length, and syntactic complexity seemingly suggest that
young CWS may experience some degree of difficulty
quickly and/or efficiently formulating morphosyntactic
structures.
Given that descriptive studies have consistently
shown a relation between utterance output characteristics (e.g., utterance length and complexity) and instances
of stuttering-like disfluencies, it seems quite possible
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
553
that an experimental study of the syntactic processes
of CWS may provide further insights into the speechlanguage production variables associated with the onset and development of stuttering in children. One
means of experimentally assessing the syntactic processing abilities of CWS would be to use a sentence-structure priming paradigm, a procedure sometimes referred
to as structural or syntactic priming or syntactic persistence (Pickering & Branigan, 1999). Such paradigms
have been used in psycholinguistic research to examine syntactic processing in adults with typical language
production (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989, 1990; Bock & Griffin, 2000; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock et al., 1992;
Branigan, Pickering, Liversedge, Stewart, & Urbach,
1995; Smith & Wheeldon, 2001) and atypical language
production (Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998; Saffran & Martin, 1997). Furthermore, this methodology has been
adapted to study syntactic processing of young language users (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999; Leonard et al.,
2000, 2002).
During a typical sentence-structure priming paradigm in spoken language production, participants first
listen to and then repeat a priming sentence composed
of a specific syntactic form (e.g., see Bock, 1986). After
the participant repeats the sentence, he or she is immediately presented with a picture that is semantically
unrelated to the priming sentence and is then asked to
describe the pictured event. Findings from these studies generally indicate that participants have the tendency to describe the picture with the same syntactic
form as the preceding priming sentence (i.e., syntactic
persistence). For example, the priming sentence, “The
girl is giving the bone to the dog” (a prepositional dative) would tend to be followed by a picture description
such as, “The boy is kicking the ball to the girl” (also a
prepositional dative). This tendency to use a previously
presented syntactic form has also been shown to reduce
the amount of time dedicated to the generation of syntactic structure (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). Importantly,
results of empirical research in this area generally suggest that syntactic persistence cannot be attributed to
lexical (i.e., types of words), thematic (i.e., types of
events), or metrical/prosodic (i.e., sound patterns) similarities between primes and targets, but rather it appears to be associated with certain aspects of syntactic
representation (e.g., the retrieval and assembly of the
sentence frame’s component structure; Bock, 1989; Bock
& Loebell, 1990; Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Smith &
Wheeldon, 2001).
As mentioned above, recent adaptations of this
structural priming paradigm have been used to assess
syntactic persistence among very young language users. For example, Brooks and Tomasello (1999) found
that when 2.5- to 3-year-old children repeatedly heard
554
novel verbs used in passive and active transitive constructions, they were much more likely to use these constructions in their subsequent utterances. Similarly,
young children with specific language impairment (SLI)
have been found to make greater use of grammatical
morphemes (e.g., auxiliary is) when given a prime employing the syntactic frame and prosodic structure required in the target sentence (e.g., prime: “The birds
are building the nest”; target: “The horse is kicking the
cow”) than when given a prime that differed from the
target in its syntactic frame and prosody (e.g., prime:
“The doctor smiled”; target: “The horse is driving the
car”; Leonard et al., 2000). These findings suggest, according to the authors, that “some portion of the grammatical morpheme limitations of children with SLI can
be traced to production processes” (Leonard et al., 2000,
p. 375).
Most sentence-structure priming studies of adults
and children have used the frequency of occurrence of a
given syntactic structure as the main dependent measure. However, syntactic persistence in spoken language
production has also been examined in adults using the
dependent measure of response latencies to target sentences (i.e., speech reaction time [SRT]; Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). Smith and Wheeldon (2001) recorded response
latencies during two conditions: (a) target sentences preceded by a syntactically related prime (syntactically related condition) and (b) target sentences preceded by
syntactically unrelated primes (syntactically unrelated
condition). They found that speech response latencies
were significantly faster (by 55 ms) in the syntactically
related condition than in the syntactically unrelated
condition and that this facilitation effect was apparently
not due to priming of processes involved with visual
perception, conceptualization, lexical access, or phonological planning. According to Smith and Wheeldon,
these findings provide support for the hypothesis that
“the function of syntactic persistence is to reduce the
processing costs of the speaker and so to promote the
fluency and rapidity of utterance generation” (p. 157).
In a preliminary study to that currently reported,
Anderson (2001) developed an age-appropriate version
of the sentence-structure priming paradigm to assess
the online syntactic processing abilities of 3- to 5-yearold typically developing CWNS (N = 11). Specifically,
these children were asked to describe, as quickly as possible, 17 black-on-white line drawings of children, adults,
and animals performing activities that could be appropriately be described by means of simple active affirmative declarative (SAAD) sentences (e.g., “The man is
walking the dog”) on a computer screen. SRT was measured from the onset of the picture presentation to the
onset of the child’s verbal response in the absence and
presence of priming sentences. Results revealed that 8
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
of the 11 (73%) participants demonstrated faster SRTs
in the presence rather than the absence of priming sentences, while only 3 (27%) exhibited slower SRTs. This
pilot study demonstrated the feasibility of using this
paradigm to study the speed of morphosyntactic construction in young children.
In summary, developing lines of evidence appear to
suggest that subtle to not-so-subtle difficulties in quickly,
efficiently planning and producing speech-language may
contribute to the problems young CWS have establishing reasonably fluent oral communication. Perhaps
employing the methodology used to study such processing abilities, as discussed above (e.g., a modified or ageappropriate version of the sentence-structure priming
paradigm developed by Anderson, 2001, for use with
preschoolers), may help us better understand selective
aspects of the temporal component of linguistic processing in young CWS, particularly those associated with
syntactic processing. Of course, one cannot completely
disassociate the contributions of other linguistic processes, such as semantic and phonological encoding, to
the overall efficiency and/or time course of syntactic
processing. However, as previously suggested, the manipulation of syntactic processes (i.e., syntactic priming) has been shown to change (i.e., speed up or reduce) the amount of time dedicated to the generation
of syntactic structure because of its effect on grammatical formulation (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). Thus, it
seems reasonable to suggest that such an investigation could provide meaningful, initial insights into the
temporal syntactic production abilities of children who
stutter.
Specifically, in the present study, we attempted to
assess whether there was a significant difference between CWS and CWNS in SRT and accuracy for picture
descriptions in the absence and presence of priming sentences, as well as syntactic-priming effects (as measured
by SRT in the no-prime condition minus SRT in syntactic prime condition). It was also considered to be of some
interest to assess whether measures of SRT in the experimental tasks were associated with stuttering-like
disfluencies in conversational speech. Thus, measures
of stuttering-like disfluencies for CWS were examined
relative to SRT in the no-prime and syntactic-priming
conditions, as well as syntactic-priming effects.
Method
Participants
Participants were 32 children between the ages of
3;3 (years; months) and 5;5 who do (n = 16) and do not
stutter (n = 16) matched for gender (4 girls, 12 boys)
and age (CWS: mean age = 53.0 months, range = 39.0–
64.0 months; CWNS: mean age = 52.8 months; range =
39.0–65.0 months). All participants were native speakers of American English with no apparent or reported
history of neurological, psychological, speech-language,
or intellectual problems per parent report and examiner observation. Children were identified for participation in this study by their parents who had heard
about it through (a) an advertisement in a parent-oriented magazine (Nashville Parent); (b) speech-language
pathologists, health care providers, daycare centers, and
so forth in the middle Tennessee area; and (c) referral to
the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Hearing and Speech Center (VBWC) for the assessment of childhood stuttering.
All CWNS and approximately 60% of CWS were identified through the magazine advertisement. The remaining CWS were identified through referral from the
middle Tennessee professional community or the VBWC.
This study was reviewed and approved by the Vanderbilt
University Institutional Review Board.
Classification and Inclusion Criteria
CWS
A child was assigned to the CWS group if he or she
(a) exhibited three or more stuttering-like disfluencies
(part-word repetitions, single-syllable word repetitions,
sound prolongations, blocks, and tense pauses) per 100
words of conversational speech (Yairi & Ambrose, 1992)
and (b) received a total overall score of 11 or above (a
severity equivalent of at least “mild”) on the Stuttering
Severity Instrument—3 (SSI–3; Riley, 1994; CWS had a
mean score of 16.13, SD = 3.48, a severity equivalent of
“mild–moderate”). Similar indexes of stuttering have been
reported elsewhere (e.g., Yairi, 1981; Yairi & Ambrose,
1992; Yairi & Lewis, 1984), with the specific definition
of the “constituent members” or different disfluency
types representative of stuttering-like disfluencies also
described elsewhere (Johnson, 1961; Williams, Silverman,
& Kools, 1968).
CWNS
A child was assigned to the CWNS group if he or
she (a) exhibited two or fewer stuttering-like disfluencies
per 100 words of conversational speech (Yairi & Ambrose,
1992) and (b) received a total overall score of 8 or below
(a severity equivalent of less than “mild”) on the SSI–3
(CWNS had a mean score of 6.75, SD = 1.00, a severity
equivalent of “very mild”).
Speech, Language, Motor, and
Hearing Abilities
To be included in this study, all participants were
required to score at the 20th percentile or higher on four
standardized speech-language tests: (a) the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test–Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
555
& Dunn, 1997), a measure of receptive vocabulary; (b)
the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; Williams, 1997),
a measure of expressive vocabulary; (c) the Test of Early
Language Development–3 (TELD-3; Hresko, Reid, &
Hamill, 1999), a measure of expressive and receptive
language ability; and (d) the Sounds in Words subtest of
the Goldman–Fristoe Test of Articulation–2 (GFTA-2;
Goldman & Fristoe, 2000), a measure of speech sound
development (see Table 1). Children were also required
to pass (a) a general and oral motor functioning screening test (the Selected Neuromotor Task Battery [SNTB];
Wolk, Edwards, & Conture, 1993; after Wolk, 1990) and
(b) a bilateral hearing screening (pure tones at 20 dB
sound pressure level for 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz;
impedance audiometry at 800 to 3,000 ohms).
Procedure
Participants were tested on two occasions, in their
homes and in a clinic room. During the home visit, the
standardized speech and language tests and SNTB were
administered to the children during data collection sessions lasting 1 to 1.5 hr. Participants visited the clinic
approximately 1 week later to participate in an informal parent–child conversational interaction for the
analysis of speech disfluencies (a 300-word conversational speech sample was obtained during the parent–
child interaction), to participate in the sentence-structure priming task (see below), and to complete the
hearing screening. All participants were audio- and
video-recorded during the clinic visit, which lasted approximately 1 to 1.5 hr.
Sentence-Structure Priming
Task: General Overview
SRT data (in milliseconds) were obtained for all
participants during a sentence-structure priming task
consisting of two conditions—a no-prime and syntacticpriming condition. The order of presentation of the two
conditions was counterbalanced across all children, and
a brief 1- to 2-min break occurred between conditions to
permit preparation of the next condition.
In each of the two conditions, participants responded
to the same 27 pictures, which consisted of 5 practice
pictures, 17 experimental pictures, and 5 filler pictures
(to be described below; see Figure 1). Previous pilot work
(Anderson, 2001) had shown that the 17 experimental
pictures were named by 3- to 5- year old children (N =
23) with 80% or greater accuracy. All pictures were selected from the Webber® Verbs & More! Cards (Super
Duper® Publications, 1998) and involved both an agent
and an object undergoing the action. Typical actions, for
example, included hugging, sitting, and petting, which
were performed in the context of events such as a boy
556
Table 1. Percentile ranks (means and standard deviations) by
participant group (CWS and CWNS) for the standardized speechlanguage tests.
Speech-language
test
PPVT-III
EVT
TELD–3
Expressive subtest
Receptive subtest
GFTA-2
CWS (%)
CWNS (%)
M
SD
M
SD
71
72
19.8
15.9
84
85
16.5
15.0
57
72
73
23.7
22.9
21.7
84
93
84
10.9
6.0
14.0
Note. CWS = children who stutter; CWNS = children who do not
stutter; PPVT-III = Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Third Edition; EVT =
Expressive Vocabulary Test; TELD-3 = Test of Early Language Development–3; GFTA-2 = Goldman–Fristoe Test of Articulation–2.
hugging a dog, a girl sitting in a chair, and a girl petting
a cat. All pictures were similar in complexity and size so
that responses reflected the linguistic stimuli rather
than visual demands; similarly, the nouns and verbs
associated with these pictures were roughly similar in
frequency and length so that responses reflected syntactic processes rather than lexical access time (McKee,
1996).
The same five practice pictures were included at the
beginning of each of the two conditions to give the children an opportunity to practice the picture description
task. During these practice trials, if the child did not
describe the picture accurately and/or completely, the
experimenter modeled the correct picture description for
the child. Data from these five practice trials, which
preceded the two conditions (for a total of 10 practice
pictures), were not analyzed.
Following the 5 practice pictures, participants responded to an identical distribution of 17 experimental
pictures and 5 filler pictures in each condition. The experimental pictures consisted of pictures that children
could readily describe using a SAAD structure (e.g., “The
boy is hugging the dog”), an active transitive construction. The filler pictures depicted actions that could be
described using a different sentence form (i.e., a negative sentence form). Fillers are generally used to camouflage the structural relationship between experimental prime sentences and picture descriptions (Bock &
Loebell, 1990; McKee, 1996). The filler pictures were
arranged so that no more than 3 experimental pictures
occurred consecutively. SRT data from these filler pictures, which occurred in both conditions (for a total of
10 filler pictures), were not analyzed.
The experimental and filler pictures were in the
same relative position in each condition, because recent
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
Figure 1. Sequence of events in the no-prime condition (A) and syntactic-priming condition (B); a filler
picture in the syntactic-priming condition (C). These pictures are from Webber® Verbs & More! ©1998 by
Super Duper® Publications. Reprinted with permission.
research has suggested that sentence-structure priming may persist over intervening sentences (Chang, Dell,
Bock, & Griffin, 2000). For example, Bock and Griffin
(2000) reported that structural priming occurred over 10
intervening sentences, whereas Boyland and Anderson
(1998) found a priming effect when primes and targets
were separated by a period of 20 min. Thus, in the
present study, the order of picture presentation was held
constant for both conditions (no-prime and syntacticprime conditions). Although this procedure does not
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
557
preclude the possibility that priming could occur as a
result of the child’s description or response to preceding
pictures, its influence would at least be the same in both
conditions. For example, Picture A was in the 10th position for the no-prime as well as the syntactic-prime condition. In this way, while priming due to the child’s responses to preceding pictures may have influenced the
child’s accuracy and speed of responding to Picture A in
the no-prime condition, the same degree of influence
would be expected for Picture A in the other, that is,
syntactic-prime, condition.
Sentence-Structure Priming
Task: Priming Conditions
No-prime (silent) condition. In the no-prime condition, children were asked to describe the 17 experimental pictures and 5 filler pictures as quickly as possible.
Specifically, children were instructed, “Tell me what you
see in the picture as fast as you can.” Each picture was
presented for 3,000 ms, and the time interval between
successive targets was 4,000 ms. Children’s responses
were recorded using a voice-activated microphone, the
output of which was inputted into a New Experimental
Stimulus Unit (NESU) coprocessor. NESU was used to
collect and analyze chronometric data and was developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The
NESU coprocessor was interfaced, synchronized, and
run simultaneously with the Pentium 200 MHz computer. The latency of the child’s picture description (i.e.,
SRT) was recorded in milliseconds using the NESU hardware and software.
Syntactic-prime condition. In the syntactic-prime
condition, children were shown the same pictures as in
the no-prime condition (i.e., the 17 experimental pictures
and 5 filler pictures). However, 2,000 ms prior to the
onset of presentation of the picture, the child was presented with an auditory priming sentence composed of
a SAAD structure (e.g., “The boy is walking the dog”) or
a negative structure (e.g., “The boy is not walking the
dog”) that in all obvious respects appeared dissimilar to
the picture (e.g., a picture of a girl throwing a stick; see
Figure 1 and Appendix). Children were told, “Don’t pay
attention to the man talking from the speakers—just
tell me what you see in the picture as fast as you can.”
Instructing children not to pay attention was based on
pilot work (Anderson, 2001) that indicated that many
children, without such instruction, repeated the priming sentence rather than describing the picture, essentially rendering their response unusable for further
analysis.
The 2,000 ms temporal distance between prime and
target was used to ensure that there was no temporal
overlap between the beginning, middle, or end of the
558
auditorily presented prime and the visual onset of the
picture word stimuli. As with the no-prime condition,
each picture was presented, one at a time, for 3,000 ms,
with time interval between successive targets of 4,000
ms. Each participant’s SRT associated with their description of the picture was recorded in milliseconds using
the NESU hardware and software system. All auditory
priming sentences contained the same grammatical
morpheme structure—for example, a contractible auxiliary, such as is, with or without negation combined with
a present progressive (e.g., an ing verb form). In addition, for each priming sentence and picture pair, attempts were made to ensure that there were no semantic or phonological similarities between the priming
sentence and picture description and that the syllable
structure and length were identical.
Preanalysis Data Preparation
To ensure that all picture descriptions to be included
in the final data corpus were accurate depictions of each
picture and had the same grammatical structure associated with each picture, we assessed the accuracy of
the children’s responses to the pictures after experimental testing. Children’s responses to each of the pictures
in the no-prime and syntactic-priming conditions were
considered accurate if they (a) contained all three components of the SAAD sentence structure (subject, contractible auxiliary and present progressive verb combination, and object; omissions of sentence-initial articles
were permitted) and (b) were relevant to the pictured
event.
Errors. A picture description response was regarded
as an error (and not included in the final data corpus) if
the response contained one or more of the following: (a)
it lacked any of the three components of the SAAD sentence structure; (b) it was not relevant to the pictured
event; (c) it did not trigger the voice-activated microphone (i.e., the child spoke too softly or failed to verbally
respond to the picture); (d) it was associated with an extraneous voice signal and/or noise in the environment that
triggered the voice-activated microphone before the child
responded; and/or (e) it contained stuttering-like disfluencies (part-word repetitions, single-syllable word
repetitions, sound prolongations, blocks, and tense
pauses) or other disfluencies (polysyllabic word repetitions, phrase repetitions, and revisions). Responses containing stuttering-like or other disfluencies were considered errors to ensure that any differences in SRT
between the two talker groups could not be accounted
for by the presence of speech disfluencies. If a child had
less than five useable tokens (i.e., picture descriptions)
per 17 experimental pictures for either condition, his or
her entire data were excluded from the study’s final data
corpus.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
Accurate picture description responses in which the
child produced only an interjection somewhere in the
sentence were included in the final analysis of SRT for
both CWS and CWNS. This allowed for the fact that all
children of this age, on the basis of our experience and
observation of preschoolers’ picture description responses, frequently produce picture descriptions with
an interjection. There were, however, no significant differences between the two talker groups in mean SRT
between fluent responses and responses with an interjection for either the no-prime, t(9) = .29, p = .78, or the
syntactic-priming condition, t(7) = .73, p = .49.
not associated with the linguistic process being studied.
These cutoff scores excluded 9.3% (CWS = 8.8%; CWNS
= 9.7%) of the total maximum tokens possible (i.e., 272
tokens per condition × 4 conditions = 1,088 total possible tokens), a finding well within Ratcliff ’s (1993)
guideline for the percentage of data points or scores that
can be reasonably eliminated from the total corpus of
data (see Table 2).
Exclusion of participants. Fifty children initially
participated in this study. Of these 50 children, 18 children, representing 36% of the total participants, were
excluded as final participants (11 CWS and 7 CWNS).
These children were excluded because they either failed
to meet participant inclusion criteria (i.e., their scores
on standardized speech-language tests rendered them
unusable as participants; 3 CWS and 1 CWNS) and/or
were unable to complete the sentence-structure priming task with no more than 70% errors and/or inaccurate responses (8 CWS and 6 CWNS). After all errors,
(a) through (d) described above, and outliers were excluded from the data pool (see Table 2), the 16 CWS who
participated in this study had 152 useable tokens in the
no-prime condition and 141 in the syntactic-priming
condition (a maximum of 272 tokens possible in each
condition). Similarly, the 16 CWNS produced 157 useable
tokens in the no-prime condition and 170 in the syntactic-prime condition.
Trimming or exclusion of outliers. As discussed by
Ratcliff (1993), there are no absolutes when trying to
determine the presence of outliers in SRT data and the
means by which to exclude them. However, exclusion of
outliers is an important consideration with SRT data
because the researcher wants to be reasonably sure that
the values contained in the analyzed data are those “that
are most likely to come from real processes under consideration and also most likely to be critical in testing
hypotheses and models” (p. 511). Given these considerations and repeated observations of the general latency/
time window associated with children’s accurate picture
description responses, SRTs below 900 ms and above
2,800 ms in both the no-prime and syntactic-priming
condition were excluded from the final data pool. Values below 900 ms were 1.2 standard deviations below
the mean for all accurate picture description responses
and, most importantly, were excluded because these
would be average for similar responses by adults (Smith
& Wheeldon, 2001) and/or so rapid as unlikely to be associated with young children’s picture description responses. Values above 2,800 ms were 2.0 standard deviations above the mean for all accurate picture
description responses and most likely associated with
inattention and/or errors—values extraneous to and/or
Analysis of Main Dependent
Measures
SRT. SRT data (in milliseconds) were obtained during each of the two experimental conditions. SRT was
measured from the visual onset of the picture to the
acoustic onset of the child’s verbal response triggered
via the voice-activated microphone. During the noprime and syntactic-priming conditions, the computer
Table 2. Number and percentage of error types and outliers for all picture description responses in the noprime and syntactic-priming condition by participant group (CWS and CWNS).
CWS
No prime
Error types
Non-SAAD sentence structure
Nonrelevant response
Voice key failed to trigger
Extraneous environmental noise
Disfluent response
Combination of two or more errors
Outliers
Total
Note.
No.
31
12
29
4
15
13
16
120
%
11.4
4.4
10.7
1.5
5.5
4.8
5.8
44.1
CWNS
Syntactic prime
No.
47
6
8
3
19
16
32
131
%
17.3
2.2
2.9
1.1
7.0
5.9
11.8
48.5
No prime
No.
25
9
21
11
16
10
23
115
%
9.2
3.3
7.7
4.0
5.9
3.7
8.4
42.2
Syntactic prime
No.
22
8
16
6
8
12
30
102
%
8.1
2.9
5.8
2.2
2.9
4.4
11.0
37.5
SAAD = simple, active, affirmative, declarative.
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
559
controlled the rate of picture and syntactic prime presentation and recorded the latency of the child’s vocal
picture description in milliseconds. Again, each child’s
SRT for each of the 17 experimental pictures in the noprime and syntactic-priming conditions was analyzed
only for accurate picture description responses.
Sentence accuracy. Sentence accuracy in the noprime and syntactic-priming conditions was analyzed
for both CWS and CWNS. For this analysis, children’s
responses to the pictures were considered accurate if
they contained a subject, a contractible auxiliary–
present progressive verb combination, and an object.
Responses containing stuttering-like or other disfluencies were included in the analysis, provided that they
contained the targeted sentence structure (e.g., a response such as, “The the girl is hu...hu...hugging the
dog”). These otherwise accurate but disfluent responses
were included in the analysis of sentence accuracy because of the fact that CWS have more speech disfluencies
in their responses, which would artificially decrease the
number of accurate responses that could be subsequently
analyzed.
Speech disfluency measures. To determine the relationship between speech disfluency measures and SRT
for CWS (and to determine talker group classification),
the 300-word conversational speech sample was analyzed for each participant for the mean frequency of stuttering-like disfluencies per 100 words. Measures of
speech disfluency were based on the children’s conversational speech, given the observation that speech
disfluencies for children are significantly fewer during
picture naming or picture description tasks (Wolk, 1990)
than during conversation.
Data analysis. SRT data in each of the two conditions for both talker groups were tabulated in terms of
the mean SRT for accurate responses and then analyzed
using a 2 × 2 (Group × Condition) analysis of variance
(ANOVA), and follow-up t tests, as needed. Additional
analyses included the use of ANOVAs to examine the
effects of presentation order on SRT and accuracy, to
examine prosodic similarities between primes and target sentences on SRT, and to examine linear trends in
SRT. Mean accuracy scores in the no-prime and syntactic-priming conditions for both talker groups were analyzed using 2 × 2 (Group × Condition) ANOVAs. Finally,
for the group of CWS, Pearson product–moment correlation coefficients were used to examine the relationship between (a) mean frequency of stuttering-like
disfluencies and mean SRT and (b) mean frequency of
stuttering-like disfluencies and syntactic-priming effects
(i.e., SRT in no-prime condition minus SRT in syntactic-priming condition).
Intra- and interjudge measurement reliability. Intra- and interjudge reliability measures were obtained
560
for total disfluencies (stuttering-like plus other disfluencies) and stuttering-like disfluencies, as well as response
accuracy measures. For the speech disfluency measures,
8 participants were randomly selected from both the
CWS and CWNS groups (n = 16). The 300-word conversational speech samples from these participants, representing approximately 50% of the total data corpus (300
words per participant for a total of 4,800 words), were
then used for intra- and interjudge measurement reliability. Specifically, intrajudge reliability was assessed
by having the first author judge each speech sample for
the mean frequency (i.e., the average frequency per 100
words) of total and stuttering-like disfluencies on two
different occasions, separated by a period of 1 month.
Interjudge reliability was assessed by having the first
author and a doctoral student, both of whom are certified speech-language pathologists and experienced in the
assessment of stuttering, judge each speech sample for
total and stuttering-like disfluencies. Intra- and interjudge reliability scores for the two speech disfluency measures were assessed across participants using the following formula: smaller disfluency count/larger disfluency
count × 100. Intrajudge reliability for the mean frequency
of total disfluencies (both stuttering-like and other disfluencies) and stuttering-like disfluencies was 94% and
93%, respectively, whereas interjudge reliability for the
overall mean frequency of total and stuttering-like
disfluencies was 91% and 89%, respectively.
For the measure of response accuracy, 8 other participants were randomly selected from both the CWS
and CWNS groups (n = 16). Six responses per subject
(three responses from the no-prime condition and three
responses from the syntactic-priming condition) were selected randomly. This resulted in approximately 17% of
the total data (6 responses × 16 participants = 96 responses) being used for intrajudge and interjudge measurement reliability for response accuracy. Intrajudge
reliability was assessed by having the first author judge
each response for accuracy on two separate occasions,
separated by a period of 2 months. Interjudge reliability
was assessed by having the first author and a trained
observer judge each response for response accuracy.
Intrajudge and interjudge reliability for the response accuracy measures was 97% and 97%, respectively.
Results
Descriptive Information
Stuttering/Speech Disfluencies
As would be expected on the basis of participant
selection criteria, CWS exhibited significantly greater
mean total disfluencies (i.e., stuttering-like plus other
disfluencies): M = 11.06, SD = 5.18, t(30) = 6.28, p = .00,
as well as stuttering-like disfluencies: M = 8.15, SD =
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
5.19, t(30) = 5.19, p = .00, compared with CWNS—total: M = 2.52, SD = 1.67; stuttering-like: M = 1.29, SD =
0.99. These data pertaining to speech disfluencies are
based on the aforementioned 300-word conversational
speech sample.
Speech and Language Abilities
Although all participants scored within normal limits (i.e., at or above the 20th percentile) on a variety of
standardized speech-language tests (PPVT-III, EVT,
TELD-3, and GFTA-2) (see Table 1), a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed significant betweengroup differences on one of these measures. In particular, CWS scored lower than CWNS on both the Expressive,
F(1, 24) = 11.77, p = .002, and Receptive, F(1, 24) = 7.99,
p = .009, subtests of the TELD-3. Interestingly, although
CWS consistently scored lower than CWNS on all
speech-language measures, findings did not replicate
those of Pellowski, Conture, Anderson, and Ohde (2001),
who found that CWS scored significantly lower than
CWNS on the GFTA-2.
Correlations of Speech-Language
Measures and SRT
There were no significant correlations between the
TELD-3 subtests and SRT associated with the no-prime
condition, syntactic-priming condition, or syntactic-priming effects (p values ranged from .15 to .93). In other
words, although there were significant differences between CWS and CWNS in their TELD-3 subtest scores,
there was no systematic relationship between this measure of expressive and receptive language ability and
the study’s main dependent measure, that is, SRT. Thus,
it would seem that this between-group difference in expressive and receptive language ability cannot be readily
used to explain any potential differences between the
two groups on the primary dependent variable in this
study.
SRT (in ms)
SRT data were subjected to an ANOVA with talker
group (CWS and CWNS) as a between-subjects variable
and condition (no-prime and syntactic-priming) as a
within-subjects variable (see Figure 2A). Results indicated a significant main effect for condition—that is, SRT
was slower in the no-prime condition than in the syntactic-priming condition for all participants, F(1, 30) =
10.74, p = .003—but no significant between-subjects effects, F(1, 30) = 1.71, p = .20. Results further revealed a
significant Group × Condition interaction effect, F(1, 30)
= 4.03, p = .05. In other words, as shown in Figure 2B,
there appears to be a significant difference between CWS
and CWNS in syntactic-priming effects. Follow-up t tests
(Bonferroni adjusted) revealed that CWS were significantly faster by approximately 212 ms (SD = 259 ms) in
the syntactic-priming condition than in the no-prime
condition, t(15) = 3.27, p = .005; however, for CWNS, the
51 ms (SD = 189 ms) difference in SRT between the noprime and syntactic-priming condition was not significantly different, t(15) = 1.08, p = .30. Therefore, these
findings suggest that CWS tend to benefit more, in absolute terms, from syntactic primes than do CWNS.
Informal assessment of the individual performances
of CWS revealed that 13 of the 16 (81.3%) children demonstrated a tendency for faster SRTs (on average, 269
Figure 2. (A) Mean speech reaction time (SRT; in milliseconds) in the no-prime and syntactic-priming condition and (B) mean syntacticpriming effects (no-prime minus syntactic-priming condition) for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children who stutter (CWS; n = 16) and children who
do not stutter (CWNS; n = 16). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
300
CW S
1 7 00
CW NS
SR T (m s)
1 6 00
1 5 00
1 4 00
1 3 00
1 2 00
1 1 00
1 0 00
N o P rim e
S yntactic P rim e
250
Syntactic Prim ing Effect (m s)
1 8 00
200
150
100
50
0
-50
CWS
CWNS
-100
C o nditio n
(A)
(B)
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
561
ms faster) in the syntactic-priming condition than in the
no-prime condition. Similarly, 10 of the 16 (62.5%) CWNS
exhibited faster SRTs in the syntactic-priming condition (on average, 151 ms faster). Three (18.8%) CWS
and 6 (37.5%) CWNS demonstrated a tendency for slower
SRTs in the syntactic-priming than in the no-prime condition (on average, 122 ms slower). Thus, on a purely
descriptive basis, these data suggest that although both
CWS and CWNS tended to demonstrate faster SRTs in
the syntactic-priming condition than in the no-prime
condition, CWS were almost 50% faster in the syntactic-priming condition than CWNS.
Additional follow-up t tests (Bonferroni adjusted)
revealed a significant between-group difference for the
no-prime condition, t(30) = 2.43, p = .02, but not for the
syntactic-priming condition, t(30) = 0.16, p = .87. Thus,
CWS were significantly slower than CWNS in the noprime condition (CWS: M = 1,694, SD = 201; CWNS: M
= 1,518, SD = 207), a difference that was essentially
nullified in the syntactic-priming condition (CWS: M =
1,482, SD = 268; CWNS: M = 1,467, SD = 256). A 2 × 2 ×
2 (Group × Condition × Order) ANOVA also revealed no
main effect of presentation order for SRT in the no-prime,
F(1, 28) = 0.30, p = .59, and syntactic-priming conditions, F(1, 28) = 3.66, p = .07. Furthermore, there was
no significant Presentation Order × Group interaction
in the no-prime, F(1, 28) = 0.70, p = .41, and syntacticpriming conditions, F(1, 28) = 0.17, p = .68. These results indicate that the presentation order of the two conditions, which had been counterbalanced across all
children, had no significant effect on SRT in the no-prime
and syntactic-priming conditions for children in the two
talker groups.
Although studies with adult participants have essentially ruled out the possibility that syntactic-priming effects could be due to prosodic similarities between
primes and targets (e.g., Bock & Loebell, 1990), a twoway ANOVA was conducted to examine whether any
prosodic similarities between the prime and target sentences could possibly have influenced our findings. For
this analysis, mean SRT for accurate responses that had
the same number of syllables as the prime was compared to responses in which the number of syllables in
the prime and response were different (only 35% of the
useable responses for both talker groups had a different
number of syllables than the priming sentence). The
ANOVA revealed no significant main effect for syllable
number, F(1, 58) = 1.03, p = .32, and no Group × Syllable interaction, F(1, 58) = 0.01, p = .93. These results
indicate that the number of syllables in the child’s picture description response relative to the priming sentence had no appreciable effect on SRT.
As previously mentioned, the order of the experimental and filler pictures was held constant for both
562
conditions because recent research has indicated that
sentence-structure priming may persist over intervening sentences (Chang et al., 2000). Although keeping the
pictures in the same relative position in each condition
minimized any potential differences between the two
conditions in terms of the influence of priming from the
child’s responses to preceding pictures, there was still
the possibility that SRT data might have been influenced
by factors within each condition (i.e., listwise priming).
To determine whether these factors had any effect on
picture description latencies, a one-way ANOVA was
used to analyze linear trends in SRT across the 17 experimental pictures for both CWS and CWNS. For CWS,
the analysis revealed no significant linear trends in SRT
means for the 17 experimental pictures in both the noprime, F(16, 132) = 1.48, p = .25, and syntactic-priming
conditions, F(16, 120) = 0.12, p = .72. Similarly, for
CWNS, the ANOVA revealed no significant linear trends
for SRT in the no-prime, F(16, 140) = 1.45, p = .23, and
syntactic-priming conditions, F(16, 154) = 1.74, p = .19.
Thus, it would appear that SRT for the two talker groups
does not vary linearly with subsequent picture presentations during the two experimental conditions.
Sentence Accuracy During No-Prime
and Syntactic-Priming Conditions
Between-group differences in the number of accurate responses in the no-prime and syntactic-priming
condition were analyzed using a 2 × 2 (Group × Condition) ANOVA. As previously mentioned, responses containing stuttering-like or other disfluencies were included in this analysis, provided that they were
otherwise accurate. The ANOVA revealed no significant
main effect for condition, F(1, 30) = 0.94, p = .34, or Group
× Condition interaction, F(1, 30) = 0.00, p = .99. However, there was a significant between-subjects effect, F(1,
30) = 4.85, p = .04, and follow-up t tests (Bonferroni adjusted) revealed that CWS produced significantly fewer
accurate responses than CWNS in the syntactic-priming condition (CWS: M = 12.25, SD = 2.46; CWNS: M =
13.81, SD = 2.01): t(30) = –1.97, p = .05, but not in the
no-prime condition (CWS: M = 11.88, SD = 2.80; CWNS:
M = 13.44, SD = 1.71): t(30) = –1.90, p = .07, although
this latter difference approached significance (see Figure 3). There was no main effect of presentation order
for accuracy in the no-prime, F(1, 28) = 3.20, p = .09,
and syntactic-priming conditions, F(1, 28) = 0.80, p =
.38, and no significant Presentation Order × Group interaction in the no-prime, F(1, 28) = 1.57, p = .22, and
syntactic-priming conditions, F(1, 28) = 2.56, p = .12.
These findings generally indicate that CWS tended to
produce fewer accurate responses than CWNS during
the sentence-structure priming task.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
Figure 3. Mean number of accurate responses (includes both fluent
and disfluent responses) in the no-prime and syntactic-priming
conditions for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old CWS (n = 16) and CWNS (n
= 16). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
CWNS
14
13
CWS
12
11
10
9
8
No Prime
Syntactic Prime
Condition
SR T in N o Prim e C o nditio n
(m s)
Number of Accurate
Responses
CWS
Figure 4. Linear regression lines depict the relationship between
(A) mean speech reaction time (SRT; in milliseconds) in the noprime condition and stuttering-like disfluencies (based on the
conversational speech sample), (B) mean SRT (in milliseconds) in
the syntactic-priming condition and stuttering-like disfluencies, and
(C) mean syntactic-priming effect (in milliseconds; no-prime minus
syntactic prime) and stuttering-like disfluencies for 16 CWS
between 3 and 6 years of age.
2200
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
0
Relationship of SRT to Stuttering
Discussion
The primary purpose of this investigation was to
examine experimentally the time course of syntactic
production processes in young CWS and CWNS. This
study was prompted, in part, by speculation that stuttering may be related to slowness, inefficiencies, or
dyssynchronies within linguistic formulation components (Perkins, Kent, & Curlee, 1991; Postma & Kolk,
1993), as well as various empirical studies indicating
that stuttering events appear to be related, at least in
part, to the linguistic features of an utterance (e.g.,
Melnick & Conture, 2000; Yaruss, 1999; Zackheim &
Conture, 2003). A modified version of the sentence-structure priming paradigm (Bock, 1990; Bock et al., 1992)
was used to examine experimentally the time course of
3
6
9
12
15
18
21
24
Stutte r i ng -L i ke D i s fl ue nc i e s (% )
(A) No Prime
CWS
SR T in Sy nta c tic Prim ing
C o nditio n (m s)
2200
r = .37, p = .15
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
0
3
6
9
12
15
18
21
24
Stutte r i ng -L i ke D i s fl ue nc i e s (% )
(B) Syntactic Priming
Sy nta c tic P r im ing E ffe c t (m s )
Stuttering-like disfluencies during the conversational speech of CWS were significantly correlated to
mean SRT in the no-prime condition (r = .58, p = .02),
but not in the syntactic-priming condition (r = .37, p =
.15; see Figures 4A and 4B). There were also no significant correlations between stuttering-like disfluencies
and syntactic-priming effects (r = .06, p = .82) for CWS
(see Figure 4C). These findings suggest that CWS who
produced more stuttering-like disfluencies tended to
exhibit slower picture description latencies in the absence of a prime than did children who produced fewer
stuttering-like disfluencies; however, syntactic-priming
effects had no appreciable relationship to conversational
stuttering-like disfluencies of CWS. In other words, the
frequency of conversational stuttering-like disfluencies
had no significant relationship to the degree to which
CWS benefited from syntactic primes.
r = .58, p = .02
2000
CW S
750
650
550
450
350
250
150
50
-50
-150
-250
-350
r = .0 6 , p = .8 2
0
3
6
9
12
15
18
21
24
Stutte r i ng -L i ke D i s fl ue nc i e s (% )
(C) Syntactic Priming Effect
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
563
syntactic processes in CWS and CWNS, the findings of
which are considered below.
Main Findings: An Overview
The present study resulted in four main findings:
(a) temporal processing of sentences for 3- to 5-yearold children appears to be influenced by experimental
manipulation (i.e., syntactic priming) of sentence retrieval, integration, and/or production; (b) CWS demonstrated a greater syntactic-priming effect (approximately 212 ms) than CWNS (approximately 51 ms); (c)
CWS produced fewer accurate responses than CWNS
during the sentence-structure priming task; and (d)
CWS who produced more stuttering-like disfluencies
during conversational speech exhibited slower SRTs
(during accurate picture descriptions) in the absence
of a syntactic prime, but there was no apparent relationship between the frequency of conversational stuttering and a syntactic-priming effect. The general implications of each of these four findings will be discussed
immediately below.
Syntactic Priming Is a Viable
Method to Study Linguistic
Processing of Preschool Children
First, the present findings suggest that temporal
processing of sentences for 3- to 5-year-old children is
influenced by experimental manipulation (i.e., syntactic priming) of sentence retrieval, integration, and production. This finding is consistent with Smith and
Wheeldon’s (2001) finding that adults exhibited faster
picture description latencies in a syntactically related
condition compared to a syntactically unrelated condition. It is also consistent with Melnick, Conture, and
Ohde’s (2003) finding that 3- to 5-year-old CWS and
CWNS produced faster SRTs during a picture-naming
task when given a phonological prime than in the absence of such a prime. However, Melnick et al. (2003)
also reported no significant difference between CWS and
CWNS in terms of SRT, whether in the absence or presence of phonological primes, a finding that contrasts with
the present results that CWS were significantly slower
than CWNS in the absence of a priming sentence. However, the present findings are generally consistent with
phonatory and manual reaction-time studies of schoolaged children in which CWS are reportedly slower than
CWNS in response to tones (see Bloodstein, 1995, for a
review of these studies). Although speech motor contributions to the present findings cannot be categorically
ruled out, it should be noted that given the similarity of
the spoken task in both conditions, any such contributions would affect both the control and experimental
conditions alike. Such events would only be an issue for
564
our study if they differentially influenced the control
and experimental conditions; however, there is no apparent evidence that speech motor events differentially
influenced our two priming conditions, whether within
or between talker groups.
CWS Appear to Exhibit a Greater
Syntactic-Priming Effect Than CWNS
Second, CWS demonstrated a greater syntacticpriming effect (approximately 212 ms) than CWNS (approximately 51 ms). In terms of absolute amount of
priming effect, present findings with CWNS (i.e., a syntactic-priming effect of 51 ms) are quite consistent with
those of Smith and Wheeldon (2001), who found that
adults were, on average, 55 ms faster in a syntactically related condition than in a syntactically unrelated
condition. The finding that CWS exhibited greater syntactic-priming effects than CWNS is consistent with a
structural-priming study of grammatical morpheme
variability in children with SLI (Leonard et al., 2000).
Specifically, Leonard et al. (2000) found that when given
a prime containing the syntactic frame required for a
target sentence, children with SLI produced the auxiliary is significantly more often than their typically developing peers. In other words, the children with SLI
appeared to benefit more from the syntactic primes
than typically developing children. It should be noted,
however, the dependent measures and those used by
Leonard et al. (2000) and the present investigators differed. That is, in Leonard et al. (2000), syntactic-priming effects were based on the frequency of children’s
use of the auxiliary is, whereas for the current study,
these effects were based on syntactic-priming effects
(i.e., SRT differences between the two conditions).
Findings of a greater syntactic-priming effect for
CWS also parallel those of Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998),
who reported that Dutch speakers with Broca’s aphasia
exhibited syntactic priming, whereas normal adult
speakers did not. This finding suggests, according to
Pickering and Branigan (1999), that individuals with
Broca’s aphasia still have some knowledge of language,
even though they do not always use it appropriately,
and that syntactic priming is an automatic, implicit process. Pickering and Branigan have further speculated
that syntactic priming is likely to be highly effective in
children with less developed language abilities. In this
respect, “Skilled language-users might be less susceptible to syntactic priming, because they have more computational resources available and hence are much more
active about developing their communicative goals in
syntactic detail” (Pickering & Branigan, 1999, p. 141).
According to this line of reasoning, if CWS are relatively
less skilled in morphosyntactic construction processes,
they may benefit more from syntactic priming because
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
they presumably have fewer computational resources
available for syntactic processing. Consequently, these
children would be more likely to take advantage of a previously presented syntactic prime, as it requires less active processing on their part. On the other hand, CWNS
presumably would not benefit as much from syntactic
primes because they may have relatively more resources
available for syntactic processing, which allows them to
more actively participate in syntactic processes.
CWS Appear to Produce Fewer
Accurate Responses Than CWNS
Third, CWS produced fewer accurate responses
than CWNS during the sentence-structure priming
task. This finding, coupled with the fact that the time
course of syntactic priming is much slower for CWS
than it is for CWNS, provides further evidence in support of the hypothesis that CWS may have difficulty
quickly and/or efficiently formulating morphosyntactic
structures. In their phonological priming study of young
CWS and CWNS, Melnick et al. (2003) examined the
converse of accuracy—that is, the number of errors that
occurred during the picture-naming task—and found
no significant differences in the number of errors between CWS and CWNS. If no differences were found
between CWS and CWNS in the number of errors they
produced during the picture-naming task, one might
infer that there would be no between-groups differences
in the number of accurate responses produced during
the task. The difference between our findings and those
of Melnick et al. may relate to the nature of the task
that the children performed—that is, Melnick et al.’s
participants named pictures, a task that one could reasonably argue is less difficult than one requiring children to describe what is happening in pictures. Perhaps,
therefore, it should not be surprising that differences in
accuracy between CWS and CWNS were found for the
picture description task, but not for the picture-naming task. The more challenging picture description task
presumably places greater demands on linguistic resources than picture naming and thus is more likely to
elicit speech-language planning and production differences, if present. In other words, whatever linguistic
differences do exist between CWS and CWNS in terms
of speech-language planning processes are probably
more apt to be observed as communicative task demands increase (e.g., telling a story about an event that
took place yesterday) and less apt to be noticed when
communicative task demands are lessened (e.g., naming a picture).
Although the main dependent measure in the
present study was SRT, it is interesting to note that both
groups of children produced slightly more accurate
SAAD responses in the syntactic-priming condition than
in the no-prime condition, but this difference was not
significant. In other words, there was no clear tendency
for the SAAD sentence structure to be produced more
frequently following a syntactic prime than in the absence of such a prime. This is somewhat surprising given
that in most studies, syntactic-priming effects with
adults and children are typically based on whether or
not a particular target structure is produced more often
following a syntactic prime. Findings from these studies have generally indicated that target sentences are
produced more frequently following the presentation of
a syntactic prime. However, unlike other studies in this
area, our study did not require children to repeat the
prime following its initial presentation, and this may
have accounted for why the syntactic-priming condition
did not result in significantly more accurate (i.e., SAAD)
responses than the no-prime condition. In the present
study, where the focus was on the temporal rather than
accuracy aspects of participants’ responses, it was not
possible to have children repeat the prime, because the
child’s repetition of the prime would have triggered the
voice-activated microphone. It may be that the repetition of a prime leads to greater and more persistent activation of the syntactic representation, because the
prime is, by virtue of its repetition, more likely to be
fixed in memory, thereby increasing the chance that an
accurate response will be produced. On the other hand,
failure to repeat the priming structure may result in
less persistent activation.
Relationship of Stuttering
to SRT
The fourth main finding indicated that CWS who
produced more stuttering-like disfluencies during conversational speech exhibited slower SRTs (during accurate picture descriptions) in the absence of a syntactic
prime than did CWS who produced less stuttering-like
disfluencies. However, when the linguistic systems of
these children were manipulated via syntactic primes,
this relationship was no longer present. Interestingly,
Pellowski and Conture (2004) reported similar findings
for CWS during a lexical-priming task in which CWS
who produced more stuttering-like disfluencies (on the
basis of a conversational speech sample) had slower picture-naming latencies in the absence of a prime than
did CWS who produced fewer stuttering-like disfluencies. Perhaps CWS who stutter more during conversational speech have greater difficulty quickly and efficiently generating and producing sentences, which would
likely result in their producing slower picture description latencies. On the other hand, the grammatical systems of CWS with fewer stuttering-like disfluencies may
be more developed, which would presumably result in
faster picture description latencies.
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
565
Theoretical Implications of the
Main Findings
In general, the present findings would seem to provide some degree of empirical support for the notion that
linguistic variables may contribute to childhood stuttering. This suggestion is based on the finding that CWS,
when compared to CWNS, benefit more from syntactic
primes to the point where their syntactic processing
speeds more closely approximate those of CWNS. Although various explanations could be used to account
for the relationship between childhood stuttering and
possible differences in syntactic processing, a brief explication of the following three alternative explanations
appears warranted in our attempt to account for some
of the linguistic processes that could potentially contribute to childhood stuttering.
Difficulties With Syntactic
Formulation Processes
On the basis of current findings, it is not unreasonable to suggest that some CWS have difficulty with
morphosyntactic construction processes, which in turn
lead to delays in the production of sentences. Such slow
rates of activation may reflect problems with the retrieval of a syntactic frame (syntactic rules) or the integration and assembly of a syntactic frame’s component
structure. If CWS have relatively more difficulties with
syntactic representation, perhaps they are more likely
to benefit from syntactic priming than CWNS who exhibit no such difficulties, because syntactic priming facilitates the formulation and production of sentences.
One might further posit that difficulties with syntactic
planning and/or retrieval processes could result in frequent hesitations, repetitions, and prolongations during
conversational speech. According to this conceptualization, such speech disfluencies would reflect a speaker’s
attempt to buy time for further syntactic processing functions. In contrast, there may be a trade-off between
morphosyntactic construction processes and speech fluency. In this case, if CWS have difficulty with sentencelevel production operations, they may have to exert more
attention, effort, and memory to these operations during syntactic processing (see Just & Carpenter, 1992, for
a related discussion of individual differences in working
memory capacity for cognitive and related tasks). Expending such resources on syntactic processing may result in
fewer resources being available for the production of fluent speech, which could, at least theoretically, result in
increased speech disfluencies.
Difficulties With Lexical or
Phonological Encoding Processes
A second alternative explanation suggests that
CWS may not have difficulty with syntactic formulation
566
processes, but rather with those processes involved with
the encoding of lexical and/or phonological information.
For example, some children who stutter may have difficulty accessing a lemma (syntactic word) or its lexeme
(phonological aspects of the word; see Levelt, Roelofs, &
Meyer, 1999, for further discussion of the distinction
between lemma and lexeme). Such difficulty, one might
reasonably speculate, could result in or contribute to
further delays and/or disruptions in the generation of
the surface structure. This possibility is based on Levelt’s
(1989) model of speech-language production, which
states that the activation of a lemma triggers various
syntactic procedures to build a “proper syntactic environment” (p. 235). Thus, if the lemma was slow to be
activated, the syntactic procedures would also fail to be
triggered in a timely manner, resulting in a less-thanideal syntactic environment. If CWS do have difficulty
with lexical and/or phonological encoding, the fact that
syntactic primes have a facilitative effect for CWS can be
explained, as previously suggested, in terms of changes
in the distribution of resources. That is, speech production could be marked by frequent hesitations, repetitions,
and prolongations in an attempt to obtain additional
processing time for lexical and/or phonological encoding or as a result of trade-offs between lexical and phonological formulation processes and speech fluency.
Difficulties With a Combination of
Linguistic Formulation Processes
A third possible explanation might be that CWS
have activation and/or planning difficulties (i.e., initiating and/or performing the procedures in a formulation
process) with a combination of linguistic formulative
processes. Perhaps this combination of subtle difficulties may be ultimately expressed as an imprecise or delayed phonetic plan for connected speech (i.e., the end
product of the formulation component, which includes
segmental, metrical, and intonational form representations; Levelt, 1989, 1992). Accordingly, CWS could exhibit one or more areas of difficulty when accessing, organizing, and/or planning material for speech-language
production. This might mean that there are subgroups
of CWS with different combinations of underlying problems. It might also mean that the problem for individual
CWS could be different at different times, depending on
the nature of the particular conversational interaction.
However, regardless of the original source of the problem, the hypothesis is that the resulting phonetic plan
for connected speech would be disrupted, resulting in
temporal delays in the production of sentences. If problems with the activation and/or planning of a combination of formulative processes negatively impact the generation of phonetic plans for connected speech, the
forward flow of speech production could be disrupted,
resulting in disfluent speech.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research • Vol. 47 • 552–571 • June 2004
Caveats
As with any empirical investigation, several different issues should be considered when evaluating and
interpreting the present findings. These include issues
pertaining to (a) the syntactic-priming effect for CWNS,
(b) nonlinguistic contributions to the present findings,
(c) the possible influence of temporal cuing on SRT data,
and (d) the production of speech disfluencies during the
sentence-structure priming task for CWS and CWNS.
Syntactic-Priming Effects
be related to considerable variation in behavior and/or
the level of difficulty associated with the sentence-structure priming task.
Nonlinguistic Contributions
Although the present findings are consistent with a
linguistic account of stuttering, they neither implicitly
nor explicitly suggest that stuttering is only related to
difficulties with linguistic formulation processes. However, the paradigm used in the present study involves
the auditory presentation of a syntactic prime that facilitates linguistic encoding processes. It is thought that
if aspects of the motor control system are problematic,
they should be equally problematic in both the no-prime
and syntactic-priming conditions. In other words, because the communicative tasks or demands were identical for the two conditions for all participants, any
speech motor contributions should be the same for the
control and experimental conditions, leaving the syntactic-priming effect intact. More to the point, and as
mentioned above, motoric difficulties are only an issue
in this study if they differentially influenced the control
and experimental conditions. However, there is no empirical evidence that such events differentially influenced our conditions, within or between talker groups.
Thus, it is not highly probable that difficulties with
speech motor control processes made appreciable contributions to the present findings of between-group differences in syntactic-priming effects, making such results most consistent with a linguistic interpretation.
As we have stated, although CWNS were approximately 51 ms faster in the syntactic-priming condition
than in the no-prime condition, this difference was not
statistically significant. Because the syntactic prime did
not significantly facilitate the syntactic encoding processes of CWNS, at least from a statistical standpoint,
one might question whether the syntactic primes were
actually tapping into the temporal aspects of their sentence-level processing. However, as previously mentioned, present findings for CWNS are similar to those
of Smith and Wheeldon (2001), who found that adults
were significantly faster (by approximately 55 ms) in a
syntactically related condition than in a syntactically
unrelated condition. Furthermore, findings are consistent with those of Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998), who found
that normal Dutch speakers failed to demonstrate a syntactic-priming effect, whereas Broca’s aphasics did. Perhaps the syntactic-priming effect for CWNS failed to
achieve statistical significance because young children
tend to be more highly variable, resulting in greater dispersion of scores (i.e., higher standard deviation).
Temporal Cuing
On the other hand, it may be that the target sentence structure used in this study—a SAAD structure—
is not sufficiently difficult for these children. In other
words, the CWNS who participated in this study may
already be operating at their maximal potential for
SAAD sentences. Therefore, the presentation of a syntactic prime had no significant benefit in helping them
process this simple sentence structure (for more detailed
discussion of theoretical and methodological considerations regarding the syntactic priming of more accessible or established grammatical structures, see Bock &
Griffin, 2000; Chang et al., 2000). Hartsuiker and Kolk
(1998) proposed a similar argument to explain the fact
that their normal speakers did not demonstrate a syntactic-priming effect. Specifically, they suggested that
the normal speakers may have had “activation levels
that are closer to the threshold…. Therefore, any input
(as a result of priming) has limited effects on the activation level” (p. 245). In essence, finding no significant
syntactic-priming effect for CWNS need not be problematic for the current study, as the effects of priming for
these children appear similar to those of adults and may
As will be recalled, no auditory prime was presented
in the no-prime condition, unlike the syntactic-priming
condition. Thus, it is possible that the mere presentation of a syntactic prime may have served as an alerting
cue that directed participants’ attention to the task.
Because there was an absence of such a prime in the noprime condition, one might argue that a child’s attention might wander between trials, resulting in slower
than normal picture description latencies during the noprime condition. To counteract this potential problem,
we could have used an alternate or unrelated prime (e.g.,
a prime that consisted of a sentence structure different
than the targeted sentence structure) as a comparison
or baseline condition to measure the effects of syntactic
priming (see Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). However, the
presentation of an alternate prime (e.g., “The girl
talked”) could potentially facilitate the use of other sentence structures (e.g., the child could respond by saying, “The boy pulled,” instead of “The boy is pulling the
wagon”). For an alternate prime to be a useful comparison condition, children must be able to produce enough
samples of the targeted sentence structure (i.e., the
Anderson & Conture: Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children
567
SAAD sentence structure). Considering the age range
of the prereading, preliterate children participating in
this study, it is likely that alternative primes would result in an insufficient amount of SAAD responses to be
of any meaningful use as a comparison condition. In fact,
findings from a pilot study confirmed this likelihood, as
only 25% of children’s responses to such alternative
primes were SAAD sentence structures.
speech-language planning and production processes, if
any, that may be germane to the problem of childhood
stuttering. It is believed that results from this line of
inquiry, as shown in the present study, should help researchers better understand if CWS have difficulty rapidly and efficiently planning and/or retrieving sentencestructure units, and whether any such difficulties may
contribute to these children’s inabilities to establish fluent speech-language production.
Speech Disfluencies
In general, only 3% of all children’s (N = 32) otherwise accurate picture descriptions were disfluent (i.e.,
there were 162 disfluent words out of 5,269 words contained within the children’s picture descriptions). Furthermore, picture description responses containing these
disfluent words, as mentioned above, were not included
in the final SRT data corpus. It seems reasonable to
suggest, therefore, that this low frequency of occurrence
of speech disfluencies precludes meaningful assessment
of differences in SRT between accurate fluent and accurate disfluent responses for both CWS and CWNS using inferential statistical procedures. Of course, this low
frequency of occurrence of speech disfluencies is not altogether surprising, considering the fact that children
tend to be more fluent in picture naming and description tasks than in other speaking conditions (e.g., Yaruss,
1997). In essence, further analyses, at least for this study,
seem inappropriate because of the very few speech
disfluencies produced by very few children in either
talker group during the experimental tasks.
Conclusion
Stuttering tends to manifest itself when children
begin to string words together to produce sentences or
when they begin to produce more complex utterances,
typically beginning between the ages of 30 and 36
months (Månsson, 2000; Yairi & Ambrose, 1992; Yaruss,
LaSalle, & Conture, 1998). This association between
speech fluency and emerging morphosyntactic skills may
be taken to suggest that CWS have subtle to not-sosubtle difficulties with various speech-language formulation processes. Such difficulties may make it more
likely that they will experience an increase in processing load, an increase in the difficulty of planning and
retrieving a structural unit, and/or a delay in accessing
linguistic information. Findings from the current study
would seem to support such a speculation because the
experimental manipulation of sentence retrieval, integration, and production processes had a significant influence on the temporal processing speeds of CWS. More
research is needed, however, particularly using processing measures similar to that employed in the present
study to better circumscribe the number and nature of
568
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a doctoral dissertation completed at Vanderbilt University in 2002 by Julie D. Anderson, who is now at Indiana University, Bloomington. This
research was supported in part by a National Institutes of
Health Grant DC00523 to Vanderbilt University. We thank
Kathryn Bock, Stephen Camarata, Lee Ann Golper, and
Robert Wertz for their thoughtful and insightful reviews of
earlier versions of this manuscript. We would especially like
to thank Herman Kolk for his early encouragement, guidance, and support to pursue this line of investigation. We
also give special thanks to Mark Pellowski for his help with
creating the computerized experiment and interjudge
measurement reliability and Courtney Zackheim for her
help with the data collection process. We are also very
grateful to the parents and children who participated in this
research, without whom there would be no study.
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DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2004/043)
Appendix. Auditory primes for the 17 experimental pictures in the syntactic-priming
condition.
Trial
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Auditory prime
The girl is printing the letter.
The boy is washing the dog.
The mom is rocking the baby.
The man is walking the doggie.
The girl is drinking lemonade.
The bird is watching the people.
The pig is drawing a picture.
The girl is dressing her doll.
The cat is chasing the rabbit.
The man is sawing the wood.
The girl is carrying the cake.
The cow is singing a song.
The boy is hitting the ball.
The dog is digging a hole.
The boy is throwing the Frisbee.
The man is writing a letter.
The girl is catching the ball.
Target sentence
The dog is sniffing the flower.
The worm is eating the leaf.
The boy is pulling the wagon.
The girl is picking the flowers.
The boy is playing basketball.
The boy is holding the balloon.
The boy is making a snowman.
The man is cutting his hair.
The boy is eating a sandwich.
The girl is petting the cat.
The boy is hugging the dog.
The boy is driving a car.
The girl is holding the cat.
The girl is painting the fence.
The girl is blowing the candles.
The bear is eating an apple.
The man is mopping the floor.
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